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YOU'RE WRONG An Irregular Column by Mykel Board We drink, or break open our veins-- solely to know, solely to know. --Charles Olsen Take a yellow pencil. A Mongol number 2 or its equivalent. Hold it in front of your face. Now close one eye. Move the pencil so that the eraser end faces your open eye. Adjust it so the only thing you can see is the eraser and the little metal ring around it. Now move your head up and down, side to side. But as you do, move the pencil at the same time, so you still only see the eraser and the metal band. Every time you move your head say pencil. Imagine that during your entire life, whenever you heard the word pencil, you would have seen the same image you're seeing now. You would not know any different. Yellow? You're crazy. Pencil's are pink-- with a touch of silver on the edges. Write with the thing? What a joke! It's not even as big a your pinky tip. Sharpen it? How could you sharpen something that's just a flat circle? You know what a pencil is. You've seen it hundreds of times. You've turned your head and looked at if from all positions. A pencil is a pink dot surrounded by a piece of metal. Anyone who says different just doesn't have a grasp of reality. Weird, huh? But that's how you see the rest of the world. I was gonna call this How To Think Part 3, but it's not as systematic as part one or part two. As a matter of fact, the system is what I want to get away from now. Let's try How To Think Part 2 1/2 or maybe How To Live. By the time you read this I'll be in Thailand with Ms. Lilly. Maybe I'll be dead. The plane leaves on my birthday and It's Korean airlines. Sometimes they crash. This time in Thailand, I wanna go to the hills to see the folks with all those rings around their necks. I want to smoke opium with a tribesman and hold hands with a monk. I can brag. You already know I've been to forty nine states and cities from Anchorage to Istanbul. That's a lot of points of view and life perspectives. Some people can't do that. They're stuck-- one way or another. They're too young or too old. They have no credit cards or are otherwise mobility impaired. But that's not the only way. It's 1969. Beloit College, in Wisconsin. I'm drinking Everclear. Ninety five percent alcohol, mixed with Thunderbird wine. Nasty stuff. I've finished my sixth glass. It suddenly occurs to me that I should take my clothes off. Clothes bind us. They destroy our naturalness. Humankind was meant to run naked. Freedom is that ability. The Constitution doesn't make us free. Freedom only comes when you exercise it. Someone has to be first. Set an example. That someone will be me. I stand in the hallway in front of the open door to my dormroom. I lift one leg to take off my boot, but the hall suddenly shifts under the other leg. I fall. Deciding this is an easier position anyway. I take off my boots and throw them

into my room. Next come the socks. As I pull my shirt off, the buttons ricochet against the floor. T-shirt, pants underpants. There I am, naked and free in the hall. "I'm free! I'm free!" I shout. "I'm a human-- not like you vegetables!" Doors open. Faces peer out. The doors quickly close again. Sometimes somebody laughs. "Cowards!" I scream at them. Using the wall as a crutch, I pull myself nakedly to an upright position. I've got to make them face the truth, rather than sit behind closed doors giggling in their cloth chains. Slowly, I navigate the spinning corridor. Shouting Live free or die! I pound on a door. They'll never open it-- the cowards. I'll knock on 'em all. "Let me in!" I yell, "I want to make you human." The first door I knock on opens. That's not supposed to happen. Don't these guys read? It's the third door that should open. Like the third wish, the third try in horror movies. Don't these people have a sense of timing? Being completely unprepared, I fall on the floor of the strangers room. "Er... Mykel," says a young male voice somewhere in the vortex above me. "Did you want something?" I lay on my stomach on the floor. My cheek presses against the institutional rug. I open my mouth, but I don't speak. Instead, the wine and Everclear rise up from my belly. A warm sticky liquid covers the side of my face where it lies against the floor. A pair of hands kneads my naked back. "Mykel get up! You got to get out of here! I'm gonna call security." Get up? I don't know where up is! I do, however, know what security is. I slowly crawl backwards, out of this guy's room, dragging a thin sheet of vomit between the side of my face and the floor. Somehow I end up in my own room. The next morning, I don't feel so good. Was I embarrassed the next day? You bet I was. I hid for the entire week. Every time I heard laughter, I imagined they were laughing at me. Do I regret getting so drunk? No! For that moment, I saw the world in a way I hadn't seen it before. It was a way no less valid than the way I see it every day. Another time: I feel the third chill. There's always three of 'em before I get off. It's a warning. I can put myself someplace where I won't be a pain. Where I won't embarrass myself. I learned my lesson. It's not my first LSD time, but it's one of the first dozen. Strong stuff, I think to myself, as the flyspecks and cracks in the wall begin to organize themselves into a coherent pattern. Mom! What're you doing in my wall? I never noticed you there before. There's a knock on the door. It's Joey. He's from Nashville. He's the one who told me the dooji was heroin. He's also the one who brought me this acid. He's taken it too. "You know," I tell him, "I just thought of a plan to save the world." "Sure you did," he says, "lets hear it, but I bet it won't work." "Of course it'll work," I tell him, "It's easy. First we decide why things are so fucked up..."

He looks at me, then traces a question mark in the air with his index finger. I follow the trail of the finger as it strobes through space. It's the most beautiful finger I've ever seen. "Differences," I say, "all the problems in the world are caused by differences. Whites against blacks, Arabs against Jews. The only way that people know who to hate is by how they're different. If everyone was the same, then you could never figure out who to hate." Joey has taken out a piece of Juicy Fruit gum. I watch in amazement as he removes the paper wrapping, then opens the tinfoil, pulls out the gum, puts it in his mouth, and chews on it. He throws the paper and tinfoil in the wastepaper basket. I immediately fish out the tinfoil, deciding it's too beautiful to just throw away. "Listen," I continued, rolling the metallic foil between my fingers, "here's the plan: We make everybody the same. Exact duplicate sets of boys and girls. No races, no size differences, nothing. Everyone is exactly like everyone else. Then there'll be no one to hate." Joey starts to say something. "I know what you're going to say," I interrupt. "What about pimples? When somebody gets a pimple he'll be different. I got that figured out. As soon as people hit puberty, we give 'em chocolate. Tons of it. Everybody will eat the chocolate and break out at the same time. They'll still look like everybody else." Joey has another objection. I anticipate it. "You wanna know how things'll get done." I say, "You wanna know how folks can work and get stuff done if they all look alike. They can slack off. Nobody will know who's working. It'll lead to wearing different clothes. Then there'll be individuals and they'll start fighting again. Well, I got the answer. Five weird guys." Joey smiles and nods. Taking one eye from its socket. He puts it in his shirt pocket. "See," I continue, "there are five weird guys who look different from everybody else. Nobody knows it, but they are running things. Whenever anything goes wrong, they take the blame. Since people need someone to hate-- they've always got the weird guys. Once a month, the weird guys go on TV and tell everybody all the bad stuff they've done. People hate them instead of each other. "In order to get out this hatred, everybody has a button in his pocket. The weird guys ask them not to push the button. They tell them that doing so will cause them immense pain. Everyone who pushes their button will give them the weird guys an electric shock. "At any one time, millions of people will be pissed off and pushing those buttons. Those buttons, of course, don't shock anyone. They are harnessed to huge turbines. The massive thumb energy drives those turbines and provides power for the entire world. No more fossil fuels. No more radiation. Just hate turned into pure useful energy." I reach for the telephone. "What are you doing?" asks Joey. "I wanna call the president." I tell him. "I've just solved the world's problems. He should know about it." Joey puts his finger on the phone button.

"Ummm," he says, "don't you think you should wait. There might be some problems with the plan you didn't think of. The president may not be ready for it." I smile at his naivete. "I thought of that," I tell him. "That's only Plan A. If it doesn't work, I have Plan B. In that one, everyone looks as different from one another as you look from a tree. That way, we'd all be living in our own worlds-- no one could bother us..." I never got through to the president, at least not before the drug wore off. Were these just stupid incidents? Were they humorous examples of how people loose their rationality while under the influence? No! Maybe it was embarrassing to be naked and puking in a stranger's room. But I got a glimpse of a world of freedom I would never have known otherwise. I saw the world, repression, fear, in a way I never had before. The perspective was worth the embarrassment. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to call the president with my five weird guys plan. But I gained an insight into hatred and conformity that I would never have had if I weren't taking those drugs. S&Mers tell me how having a fist up their butt or fishhooks in their testicles lets them experience worlds they would've never imagined otherwise. Maybe someday I'll see those worlds. I hope so. Am I saying you should let someone put their hand into your butt? Am I advocating drugs use beyond the point of incoherence? Am I telling you that you have to sleep in your own vomit to understand the world? Yes! That's exactly what I'm saying. You cannot be a complete human being until you sleep in your own vomit. You don't have to go to Istanbul. There's an Istanbul at the bottom of every forty ounce bottle of Colt 45. Until you visit it, moving beyond your own narrow concept of reality, you're mistaking the eraser for the whole pencil. Until you believe in more than you can measure, calculate or reason, you will have no concept of the depth of the universe. Until you can drink or drug yourself into mindless unconsciousness, you'll have no idea what it means to be conscious. ENDNOTES: -->I forgot to write about this last month, but it's one of my favorite stories. 3 Ohio State grad students were faced with disciplinary action in December when they solicited money at a shopping mall dressed in Santa suits. They were asking for money for Arm The Homeless. That organization aims to give guns to homeless people to help them protect themselves on the cruel city streets. Of course it was a prank-- with a message about money and priorities. But the local papers believed it and people commented on how "sick" it was. The university deserves to hear from folks who appreciate the action. You might try writing to the President, Ohio State University, Columbus OH This act of genius deserves to be complimented, not punished. --> A buncha folks got the contest right. Only the first one won the prize. The answer: Them are ducks. Them are not. Oh yes they are. See them wings? Well I'll be, them are wings!

-->I Wish I Thought of That Dept. A greeting card company called Brazen Images [269 Chatterton Parkway, White Plains NY 10606] makes cute greeting cards with naked people on them. Nothing out of the ordinary there. BUT on the back of each card there is a little notice: Send us your naked & nasty picture with a model's release and we'll notify you if we can use it! Can you imagine the stack of nudies these guys have!!! Wowie zowie. Not only that, but they can use 'em in any way they want. Once the suckers sign a model's release, they've lost all rights. I think I'm going into the greeting card business-- hmmm how 'bout "greeting videos." I bet they've got a better collection than Aaron at THE PROBE (who, by the way, slammed by band and my zine in his last issue-- and better make up for it by sending me copies of some of HIS videos I've heard about!) --> A special kiss and a hug to MRR's own Eric Bradford who knows how to put on a show. ARTLESS just played in Vermont in 8 degree weather. We played with THE FAGS (a great punkband fronted by a Ukrainian!) and Eric's band JAZZIN' HELL. Eric paid us $200 in advance. Plus he put $40 toward our car rental-- and paid for a motel room! Of course, I still managed to loose $200 on the show, but that's ARTLESS. --> Is it illegal to ask for bootleg computer programs? Nowadays, everything is illegal. So I'll just mention I read about this program called The Humor Processor. It's an automatic joke writer. The promo stuff says: You start off by selecting one of eleven proven joke formulas. Then, the program helps you brainstorm, presenting combinations of joke "building blocks" related to the topic you're working on. You'll be amazed how quickly you can create your own original humor. Mmmmm boy, did you hear the one about the guy who got drunk and took all his clothes off? --> Because I have a business registered with NY State, I get all kinds of fine mail from folks who buy the state's mailing list. Among these, are various seminars that promise to teach me everything from how to package my mail to how to avoid harassment suits from my employees. This week came an ad for a seminar called How to Handle Difficult People. In its promotion, they mention ten difficult types: The Fox, The Stone Wall, The Time Bomb, The Know-It-All, The Fake-Know-It-All, The Bump-on-a-Log, The Whiner, The Bull, The Procrastinator, The Ultra-Agreeable. I thought I was a perfectly difficult person. I'm not. I've never been ultra-agreeable. --> I guess I should comment on the Alternative Tentacles fiasco. Tim's wrong on this one. First, I like the Biafra record and it scores up there on the punkiness meter. It's only slightly country. Second, that's besides the point. Things like friendship, loyalty and history count as much as inflexible principles. There would be no punk rock as we know it today if it weren't for Biafra and company. He's got enough historical credentials, as far as I'm concerned, that if he crooned America the Beautiful it should be reviewed and advertised in these pages.

--> Hustler has started a new magazine called Barely Legal. It's for those who like it young, but on this side of the law. The zine is gonna have a column called 'Hey, Girlfriend!' It's a parody of something you'd see in Sassy. The editrix of that column is the famous Ms. Itchie. She wants you to send her bios and pictures of your band if you're either girl band or a sex positive band-- or both! Write her at PO Box 770, Sherburne NY 13460. -end-